 Hey guys, big news! For the next several weeks, we have a brand new Spirit Science series about DMT and psychedelics, featuring none other than Dr. Rick Straussman, the father of modern psychedelic research. To kick off this new flow, we've done a podcast with him that we wanted to share. Also, on September 7th, we're hosting a free workshop all about healing with plant medicine. You can RSVP to the event for free using the link in the description, and this workshop will kick off our brand new full-length course, Spirit Medicine Walkers. It's not something you're gonna want to miss. Okay, enjoy the talk. Yeah, Rick, it's such a pleasure and an honor to meet you and to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining me today. Well, thanks, it's my pleasure. I think I speak for a lot of my audience when I say, you know, as far as the brand that I've created is called Spirit Science, but out of everybody on the planet who is a true Spirit scientist, I don't know anyone better than you to really be first in line to receive that title. And your work truly is quite remarkable. It's inspired so many. It almost seems as though that your work in a way was prophetic, this pioneering, the psychedelic research. I mean, how do you feel about that? Well, it would depend on what you mean by prophetic. You're using it in the commonly accepted sense of the word in terms of foretelling or predicting. And in my prophetic state's book, DMT and the Soul of Prophecy, I broaden the definition to include any spiritual experience as laid down in the Hebrew Bible. But in terms of my work being foretelling, a more accurate expression would be that it was ahead of its time. The DMT work occurred in the early 90s and it took a long time for anybody to catch up. It was also a no-brainer in a way, kind of like the DMT work was. It was the obvious place to look in order to answer certain questions. It seemed like it. I found it so interesting that even in the first book in DMT, The Spear Molecule, you described the story of talking with one of your colleagues and you just asked them. You're like, do you think that the pineal gland has anything to do with spiritual or mystical states? And he responded with this like, there is no connection between just a very hard line here. That must have been really difficult for you to be dealing with while you're doing this pioneering research. All these other academics are basically telling you, no, there's nothing there, right? Well, that comment about the pineal, that occurred in 1983, I think. And I was still in training. I was doing my fellowship at UC San Diego. And I was just learning about psychopharmacology at the nuts and bolts level, really getting into it, brain chemistry, brain pharmacology, subjective experience, giving drugs, giving rating scales, drawing blood samples and the like. And I was pretty excited. And it seemed to me a stepping stone to doing the work that I really wanted to, which was looking at the biology of spiritual experience. So I was kind of just brainstorming with this professor. I hadn't really begun. I hadn't even started applying for any of my permits. But I was just curious where at an institution where these things are happening, can we discuss this? And he just said, forget it. And it was a good lesson because I didn't have anything to lose because I wasn't really engaged in anything at the time other than thyroid hormone research. So it did tell me I should keep my ideas to myself until I was in a position or even after beginning to do the actual research. Right. And it must have been quite a shock for you, unless I'm mistaken, when you started doing these DMT trials and people were telling you, I went to another dimension or I met these beings and you described sort of the struggle within you of being like, I don't believe you, but that even caused conflict in the experiments, right? Was it like a seamless process for you to start to look at like maybe there is another dimension, right? Because you were skeptical at first. Yeah. I mean, the stories were really unusual and it was hard for me to accept them at face value. But that's what the volunteers reported back to me, face value. And this is what they saw. This is what they felt. This is what they heard. This is how they felt about it. Yeah, I was interpreting all the trips through either one of three of theoretical lenses. Either the purely psychopharmacological one, this is your brain on drugs, or the psychological one, which is these are just representations of psychological processes, impulses or drives, conflicts. And the Buddhist perspective, which I brought to bear in the study, they still posited that the experiences were in a way delusional. They really weren't true. They were more things that the mind sprung up or unleashed on the way towards the goal of the true enlightened state, which was formless, no content, no thoughts, no feelings. So each of those three perspectives posited the unreality. Even though I never told people point blank, oh, that can't be, I was skeptical. And I kept it to myself, but I must have expressed it in what I said or how I looked. So at a certain point, I just did a thought experiment and said to myself, what if these are real independent, freestanding, objective, alternative layers of reality? If that was the case, then what? Let's explore what that's like rather than testing whether it's true or not. Once I came to that approach, volunteers were more comfortable sharing some of the stranger aspects of their experiences. My skeptical unconscious communications with them probably inhibited some of their freedom in really describing some of the properties or aspects of what they had just undergone. How do you feel about more specifically where people go when they take psychedelics? What is your understanding at the moment? Well, I think the psychedelic experience takes place in one's individual mind. So one state of health, what you've read, what you haven't read, what you've done with your life, so all of those things determine your mind. Whether or not these are real alternative universes or purely the product of brain chemistry, I don't think we can answer it. At first, I was skeptical and then I was a believer. Now I'm kind of at the point of saying, we just don't know. It's really hard to test. But in the meantime, we need to make the most of our psychedelic experiences. Right. You described many times the if so, so what question. And I really like that. Like asking the question, like, okay, if all of this is true and there are all these multiple dimensions and the pineal gland can give you a glimpses into them, so what? What does it mean? And I often wonder if that would have like paradigm shattering consequences if it were true, you know, for any mainstream religion, ideology, spirituality, and even our political systems and our social systems, how all of that would change if suddenly there was an open acknowledgement of the access to higher dimensions, right? The approach that you've taken here, it's very grounded in a practicality. And I think that's also very appreciated probably by a lot of, you know, mainstream academics today to be able to explore this and not jump to conclusions either way. Well, I think because the experiences are so dependent or they're completely dependent on your mind, your own personal psyche, I'm not sure if it's always the case you're accessing higher dimensions, you could be accessing lower dimensions, you know, so that's where the notion, you know, intellectual moral ethical scaffolding is so important because it can provide feedback for whether you're going off the rails or you're actually expanding the discussion. Very interesting. It seems as though it amplifies your consciousness, wherever that's at. Does that sound resonant to you? Does that make sense to your experiences? Yeah, you know, Stan Graf a long time ago proposed that psychedelics are non-specific mental amplifiers of the unconscious. But I think it's even, you know, more expansive than that they're non-specific amplifiers of consciousness, both your conscious mind and your unconscious mind. You know, not specifically amplify or, you know, not exactly amplify but make what's already in your mind that you are aware of more true or you're more convinced of its truth. You know, so you may think to yourself, well, I'd like to believe in God, you know, so you're thinking about it. And, you know, and then you trip and you experience, you know, something that seems to you like God, you now believe in God. And, you know, then you take that newfound firm belief in your everyday life and then start exploring, you know, where it may lead to. It could be a conscious material, you know, like in the example of the Manson group, you know, all those things and their minds were already there, but they just became more convinced of their truth and, you know, the necessity to act them out. And in a positive way too, if you want to do something, let's say that you just can't quite get yourself to do, like go back to school and you trip and you're convinced of the, you know, the goodness, you know, the rightness, the inevitability of going back to school and, you know, then you work that out later. Wow. I love that actually. I think what you just described it mirrors this discovery by the Institute of Noetic Sciences and Dr. Dean Radden and his work who recently came out with this was a few years ago now. I remember where they basically had come up with the evidence through experiments that its intention that steers reality. And this is very familiar even to the ayahuasca experiences that I've had at the, you know, the various shamanic locations that I've done that is that they'll often say that, look, it's not the, it's not the medicine, it's not the psychedelic, it's that your intention is steering the potency of the plant medicine, of the psychedelic drug. And so what you just said seems to really line up with that very well of like, it's really your intention and whatever you're trying to create, whether positive or negative or belief in God or disbelief in God, the psychedelic will help you in giving that a thumbs up if that's, would you say that that's accurate? Well, it'll clarify your intention. Most people, if they are aware of it or not, are following through on their intention to be happy, to be rich, to be sexy, to, you know, travel, you know, that's their intention. You'll want to clarify your intention before you trip. You really want to pare it down. On the psychedelic, you'll examine it from different perspectives which weren't available previously. So you may change your mind. You may decide, you know, that intention is bogus and one that you were thinking maybe you might want to switch to become more spiritual, let's say, you know, now takes, you know, center stage, you know, whereas before it was to, you know, travel or make a lot of money. That's a really good point actually. Wow, clarifying your main intention, but also maybe all the deeper subconscious things that are within you, that makes perfect sense. One of the things that I was also reflecting on in DMT and the Soul of Prophecy was, you know, speaking to the connection to the, you know, the ancient prophets of the Old Testament and, you know, these connections, these striking connections, you wrote a little bit about how, you know, there are some who theorize that the manna in the Bible was actually mushrooms or was maybe a psychedelic or that some, you know, the burning bush maybe was like the acacia tree and stuff like this with various DMT substances. And I'm wondering like, you know, more specifically from you, like with your awareness and all of this research that you've done, do you think that these Old Testament writers had had some form of psychedelic or do you think that they were facilitating an endogenous experience or was it something completely different that that's not even psychedelic related? Well, you know, to the extent that the prophetic visions are similar to DMT visions, it makes sense, you know, that endogenous DMT may play a role. And we learned just last year that the brain makes DMT in rather high quantities, comparable to serotonin dopamine. You know, so there seems to be a DMT neurotransmitter system in the mammalian brain whose function is just going to begin to be understood. But, you know, be that as it may, you know, in the prophetic states book, I do a side-by-side comparison of the DMT experience and the prophetic experience. And as I mentioned earlier, I define your prophecy as any spiritual experience in the Hebrew Bible, you know, the most memorable are the visions of Moses, let's say, or Ezekiel or Jeremiah, Daniel especially. So I compared the phenomenology, the visions, the colors, the movement in the visions, the feelings, the sounds, the bodily sensations, the emotions, and there's quite striking overlap. The evidence for the figures in the text taking in substances from the outside is pretty meager. You know, there's the incense, but there's only one very abstruse, you know, reference to the possibility of, you know, the incense, you know, helping reveal God's glory. And it only occurs one time in one person, you know, one time a year, you know, for one person. You know, Moses is burning bush, you know, that was one guy one time. You know, the manna, you know, there wasn't any manna, you know, during the time of Ezekiel and Jeremiah or Daniel. You know, there isn't, you know, much evidence in, you know, the text for, you know, taking in exogenous substances. And, you know, we already have got a source of DMT, which is the brain. You know, whether or not DMT levels, you know, rose in the brains of the prophetic figures in the text, we'll never know. It's an interesting question. And I think it is irrelevant for contemporary spiritual experience. Yes. Yeah. I know I would agree with that. And do you think there's a relationship, though, to, you know, when we go back and look at other ancient cultures around the time, especially the ancient Greeks, we know of with their mystery schools, we know that they did do psychedelic practices of sorts. You know, we know about certain ancient Egyptian plants, as well as the mysterious Kaikion. And then there's Soma in India. And, you know, these sort of mysterious what seemed to be very psychedelic brews, would it make sense then that if it was happening in Greece and India and ancient Egypt, you know, it's all very kind of localized in that area, even if it didn't make it into the text, that perhaps that there was this connection in the Old Testament as well. Or do you think that one's more an isolated experience where actual deities were showing up and maybe that was triggering the DMT and the the endogenous DMT for them to be able to see those beings? You know what I mean? Right. Well, you know, there's a couple of arguments that would go against that proposal or, you know, that idea. You know, one is, as I mentioned, there's really no, you know, textual evidence for the use of substances. And if it were that crucial, it would be mentioned, you know, like the Greeks mentioned it, the Egyptians mentioned it, you know, the Hindus mentioned it. If it were important to the ancient Hebrews, I would guess it would have appeared in the text. You know, the other is, you know, the unique aspect of Judaism, or, you know, the ancient Hebrew religion as articulated in the Hebrew Bible. You know, it's one God. There's no intermediaries. There's just you and God or the prophet anyway. But using substances in the Hebrew Bible as seen through that mindset would be idolatry. It would be paganism. It would be the Canaanite religion, ecstatic intoxication in order to approach, you know, the local gods, you know, to thank them or, you know, request things from them. The text of the Hebrew Bible is quite explicit. Only, you know, YHVH, only the Lord. You know, that's the only thing you sacrifice to. You know, the only thing you revere, the only thing you love, and the only thing you serve. You know, so I think it's, you know, both. It's, you know, the psychology of, you know, the ancient Hebrews. And I just don't think there's any evidence in a textual. Do you have, if you're open to sharing it, of course, what was perhaps one of the most insightful or enlightening or transformative psychedelic experiences that you've ever had? Well, you know, the one experience that I specifically talk about is the first time I smoked DMT, which was in 86 or 87, you know, Terence McKenna sat for me. And you know, I actually, you know, fib a bit, you know, the epilogue of the DMT book is my trip that took place under, you know, Terence's, you know, Watchful Gaze. I described the volunteer as a 36 year old psychologist or something. But that's my experience. And yeah, it was pretty transformative. You know, it started working real quickly. I laid down and I beheld this raging waterfall of color, this, this, you know, waterfall made of raging color. And out of the waterfall emerged these three or four beings that were about three or four feet high. And they were singing, you know, sing song, you know, they were looking at me. And in this, you know, sing song kind of way, said now do you see, now do you see, now do you see over and over again? And I was just slack job, like, you know, what is this? Yeah, and it started to fade. And, you know, I opened my eyes, you know, felt my hands looked around and, you know, stop the melatonin work about a month after that and moved into actually trying to get the DMT study off the ground. You know, just speaking a little bit to your personal DMT experience with the beings that said, now do you see, as well as, you know, all of the other beings that, you know, you've recorded experiments about with other people, and even the things in the Bible, that question of, is it outside of you? Is it inside of you? There's, there seems to be some consistency sometimes with seeing certain kinds of beings. I mean, based on your research, does it seem to be like the entire universe or the multiverse or, you know, just this whole reality field is just like so densely populated with life and maybe even a little bit of irony that we're always wondering like, are we alone in the universe? And you take one psychedelic and you can meet so many different beings. Is that, is that funny or interesting to you? Well, you know, the issue of dreams is interesting. You know, the Senoi in Malaysia, I think, a tribe, you know, they put more credence in the dream world than the world of waking consciousness. You know, there are indications, depending on how much attention you want to direct, you know, toward them, you know, that, well, that there is a spiritual, you know, level to reality, you know, things which are normally invisible, which we can then access in an altered state, either through dreams or through psychedelics or other technologies. The nature of that spiritual is still impossible to objectively, I always say, determine. Is it completely generated by our mind? Or is it just perceived by the mind, which is the top-down approach? I think in the case of Hebrew Bible prophecy, it's top-down, because that's what it says. And if you believe the text, that's what the implication is. You know, but in the contemporary world, the contemporary spiritual experience, we really can't say there's no objective way of determining that. You know, I believe that is both, you know, that our ability to perceive things which exist outside of us is dependent on our state of development. You know, so if you have a clear window, you can see things out there relatively clearly. If it's a blurry, dirty window, even though those things are out there, you're projecting a lot onto it because you can't make it out there. I think it's a balance. Sorry, you got me smiling so much here because you reminded me of, it's one sentence in your book in the new one. It was like asking the question of whether you'd be seeing a glass, like a window or a mirror. And if you'd be looking inside of yourself versus looking through it. And I love that you just added the detail in there in terms of the quality of the mirror slash glass of like how clearly you're seeing through or seeing yourself. And that's a really, I think that's a really valuable thing for people. Maybe that's how you can define it is it either becomes a window or a mirror, your consciousness will determine if it's a clear lens or a very foggy or dirty kind of thing. That's amazing. Thank you. I think that in sort of starting to wrap this up, I would love to ask you one final question, which is, do you have an absolutely favorite psychedelic experience? Not the experience itself, but like the psychedelic, like your favorite psychedelic? Well, I'm just not fed into psychedelics these days, but I like ayahuasca. Am I like ayahuasca? I was a member of a ayahuasca using church up in Santa Fe for a short while. I really enjoyed those experiences. You know, they were good, they were bad, they were hard, they were easy, but you know, they were quite substantive. Yeah, I think ayahuasca has a lot of healing potential because of the combination of the two plants. Yeah, that's been that's been my experience too. Earlier on, we were talking about intent as being as important as the actual substance. That church in Santa Fe that uses ayahuasca is called the UDV, and you know, they were fighting legally to be able to use ayahuasca. And they had all of their ayahuasca confiscated by the DEA. It was held in storage. You know, so for a number of years, they did their ayahuasca ceremonies without ayahuasca. They just drank water, tap water, but they still worked. They still did their work. So it was the beliefs, the actions, the way of life, and a group consciousness, but there was no ayahuasca. So I think that's an interesting example of the role of intent in determining what happens to you. Wow. Well, Rick, thank you again so much for coming on this podcast. This has been one of the most enlightening and engaging two hours. I've been really, really amazed. Really grateful for everything that you bring to the table in terms of, you know, both again, like the science and the spirit. You have both in a very grounded, down-to-earth, very practical awareness. And I think this is something we need more than ever right now. So thank you so much. And make sure if you haven't read Rick's books, DMT, The Spirit Molecule, and DMT, The Soul of Prophecy, they are incredible. And you have some more books too, right? You just said you finished one a year ago. Yeah. I wrote an autobiographical novel a year ago. It's called Joseph Levi Escaped Death. And it's a story that's about my alter ego who gets really sick and takes a long time to recover. Yeah. You know, so it's pretty dark, pretty mordant, but pretty funny. It's categorized under humor on Amazon. You know, that was an interesting process. I was really sick, almost died. I really got bad care. And I had to make the most of it. So I thought if I survive, I'm going to write this up, you know, more data, more grist for the mill. Yeah. You know, so I recuperated and I wrote it up and it was published last year. It was just turned into an audible book in May, too. So, you know, it is available. I have a couple of pages on Facebook, a personal and a public page. You know, so if I'm appearing on a show or you finished a podcast, which is now up, if I've written something, post things on both my Facebooks. And I have got my own website, rikstraussman.com. You can order books through the website. I will sign and describe them. Oh, I would love a signed copy. I love your books. They're really, they've really been impactful for me. Thank you again. And yeah, please have a beautiful day and thanks everyone for tuning in.